Miniature Portraits of some Bandsmen
My wind conducting career began in 1963 at the University of Montana. The great majority of wind conductors were still locked in the mold of the Sousa era and many sought and envied the popularity which Sousa enjoyed. The first College Band Directors National Association meeting I attended was a Western Division meeting during which the president asked everyone to stand for a moment of silence in honor of Sousa. Some university bands were still playing concerts which contained no original band music at all. The march form was the bridge to the past and band programs abounded with them. I once played a march under the baton of Edwin Franko Goldman, who must have been the very last man in New York City to wear spats daily. He brought all the percussion up by the podium and it was all show and a great noise, but hardly musical. If one programmed a march following, or before, some somber or profound composition it was called “variety.” Aesthetics was never the question.
Sousa was an entertainer and this was their model. I saw a university band conductor come out to the podium during a concert walking on his hands and wearing a clown suit. I have seen university concerts where some players wore monkey masks. There is no point in giving more examples.
I thought wind conductors should be artists like string conductors. I thought wind conductors should wear tails when they conduct, and not band uniforms. And first and foremost I tried to make the point over and over again in speeches and in published articles that it should not be the responsibility of an educational institution to entertain the public. Therefore many of the old-time band conductors found my voice very alarming. Raymond Dvorak, then Director of Bands at the University of Wisconsin, once cornered me and attacked me for my views. He told me, “The only criterion for judging a university band program is whether they have standing-room only audiences!” On his final concert he performed “Flight of the Bumblebee” while he ran around the stage with a flyswatter while the band played on.
Mark Hindsley
Mark Hindsley, Director of Bands at the University of Illinois, was a member of the older generation and the first time I saw the University of Illinois Band it was a reminder of the history of the college band. Many college bands were once R.O.T.C. bands and the University of Illinois Band program still had many military hallmarks. The equipment manager, for example, was called the Quartermaster and military-type discipline was evident in many aspects of the program. During concerts both Hindsley and his assistant conductor would, upon the conclusion of a composition, turn sharply to face the audience, then make one measured bow to the center, one to the left and one to the right before an about face to begin the next composition or leave the stage.
The University of Illinois Band, by the way, was also not part of the Music Department. This was more characteristic than many today might believe. It has only been fairly recently that the university orchestra and band at the University of California have been taken into the music department. I myself, sometime in the 1960s, had a call from a student at Columbia University in New York City asking if I were interested in being the Director of Bands of a completely student run organization. By the way, while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan the new band building on the Illinois campus had its opening ceremonies. William D. Revelli was present, together with a large number of other college conductors. University of Illinois band members were standing everywhere, serving as guides, answering questions, giving directions, etc. The building was named for the legendary founder of the modern university band program, Austin Harding, and when Revelli asked a bandsman who Harding was, the student did not know. Even by the time of his return to Ann Arbor, when he told us about this, he was visibly shaken. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Mark Hindsley was a past president of the College Band Directors National Association at the time I was elected president-elect in 1973. At the banquet when it was announced that I had won the election, Hindsley approached me with tears in his eyes, begging me not to destroy the CBDNA. I had no such thought in mind, of course, but I was struck by this expression of the very human fear of change.
Hindsley was one of the last generations of college conductors whose training had not been in music. His undergraduate degree was in Chemistry, I believe. Men such as he must have had strong native instincts about music in order to leave one profession for another. Hindsley remained interested in science and once proudly invented a device which by colored lights would measure dynamics. The conductor, presumably, could point at it and say, “you see, you’re too loud.” He was never able to interest many other conductors in this invention, for the simple reason that dynamics is not a finite element of music. It is entirely personal.
During the 1970s I was frequently invited to the campus of the University of Illinois, to lecture before the graduate music education classes ofCharles Leonard and Richard Colwell and to conduct various summer bands which they hosted and in the course of these campus visits Hindsley and I became good friends. During these visits Hindsley would always invite me out to his house for a game of pool on a table he kept in his basement. You have to try and picture this very precise man, taking pool as a science, walking around the table for long periods studying the trajectory of his intended shot. Every shot was life or death! Then, it being my turn, I would immediately shoot, seemingly without thought or planning at all -- fast and hard! Hindsley would never say a word, but I’m sure it drove him crazy since in the end our games always ended being close ones.
After he retired I invited him to Los Angeles to guest conduct my Wind Orchestra, as I then called it, in one of his transcriptions of Strauss’ tone poems. He wrote a charming letter of thanks.
Mark H. Hindsley to David Whitwell
Clovis, CA, May 1, 1976
I do want to tell you again how very much I enjoyed being with you for the weekend festival last month.
It was a particular pleasure to rehearse and conduct your band – wind orchestra in Don Juan. The young musicians are truly a fine organization, and acquitted themselves extremely well, not only in Don Juan but also in the other fine numbers on the program.
Likewise I was impressed with Morrell Pfeifle’s band (our second band) in its performances of the Hindemith Symphony and El Salon Mexico....
All in all it was an enjoyable weekend all around, and I came away with an even greater admiration for you and your work and your institution.
Clarence Sawhill
Clarence Sawhill had also been affiliated with the University of Illinois, as a young assistant conductor. Over the years I have met people in the Mid-West who remember him as a dynamic conductor with great leadership potential.
And then Sawhill moved to Southern Californiawhere he seemed to experience apersonality change that I have frequently seen in men moving from the Mid-West or East Coast to California. Is it too much sun beating down on one’s head? Is it the lazy general atmosphere of that area? I don’t know. Sawhill spent most of his career at UCLA, where they didn’t have a music education credential program and had very few music majors.
He was content that his UCLA Wind Ensemble rehearsed only one hour (50 minutes, actually) per week. I thought Sawhill loved to conduct concerts, but did not enjoy rehearsals. I recall seeing him once at the first rehearsal of an AllState Band in Kentucky. There were 200 students eager to play, eager to hear the sound of the band, eager to test the abilities of the people around them, etc. Sawhill begin by not playing a single note with the full band for one hour and twenty minutes of the scheduled two hour rehearsal. During this time he was going around tuning individuals to a machine, which teaches students not to listen, and giving away little tidbits of information to individual students – Have you every tried this fingering? Needless to say, the students who entered the room with such enthusiasm were bored to death. The only thing which bores students in rehearsal is talk, because talk has nothing to do with music. Talk can only be about music, and students want music. Curiously, music education in the United States is not based in music, it is based in talk about music. So, Sawhill was only doing what everyone did. I remember a rehearsal under Revelli when in the course of two hours the band only played five measures of one composition, a march at that. It is a very poor educational philosophy and its failure is measured by [1] the relatively few student in our music classes in spite of the fact that every child loves music, and [2] the great extent that young people are learning music on their own, completely apart of the educational institutions.
Sawhill’sown concerts were an amazing thing to behold. There was a kind of single-sheet program, but it did not contain the repertoire one was to hear that evening. On the stage, to the right of the podium, was an empty chair. Just before the concert began, a stage hand came out with maybe 50 scores and laid them on the chair. After the band tuned, and Sawhill had made his entrance, he would go to this stack of scores and look through them. He would find one, he would show it to the band, who would seek their parts, and then they would perform it. When the performance was concluded, Sawhill placed the score on another chair on the left side of the podium and then returned to the first chair to look through the scores again. Sometimes he would find one, show it to the band but they would all vigorously shake their heads “no!” So Sawhill would carry that score to the left chair and then return to look for another score on the right side. This continued until such time as Sawhill thought the concert had been long enough, at which time he thanked the audience and left. Such a concert, with no planning of repertoire, with no rehearsals to speak of, should have been a disaster, a humiliation for the university. The maddening thing was that it always sounded pretty good. Sawhill had some guardian angel who followed him throughout his life.
During his last semester at UCLA before he retired I engaged him to come to my campus to be the principal guest for a week-long band directors workshop. Clarence came every day with absolutely nothing prepared (one day he brought his son to give a trombone clinic). He would just sit down and ask if there were any questions. Long periods of silence ensued. I thought it was a waste of time, but the high school band directors present had no objections and seemed to enjoy the experience. One of them asked, “Professor Sawhill, you are just finishing a long career during which you taught at the University of Illinois, USC and UCLA. As a result of all that experience, do you have any words of wisdom for those of us who are just beginning our career?” Sawhill thought for a moment, gave a little chuckle while placing a finger on the side of his nose – a characteristic gesture of his, and observed, “The hardest thing about teaching is that you have to feel good every day!”
The following year I was considering another position and Sawhill wrote, mentioning this workshop,
Clarence Sawhill to David Whitwell
Los Angeles, CA, May 12, 1973
You have certainly made an admirable place for yourself in the band field in Southern California and all of us would really miss you. I know that the first few years in a place are usually the hardest, and too often the rest of us don’t take time to tell a new man that he is appreciated, and that he is adding something fine to our region.
Whether you go or stay, I want to take this opportunity to tell you that I have heard nothing but compliments on your work at Northridge....
Thank you for inviting me to take part in your workshop last summer. I appreciate it that we had that much work together.... As Mrs. Sawhill and I quote to each other in our times of indecision, “There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.”
Good luck in whatever you do!
Clarence
Some Noble Ones
Weston Noble, although he conducted the Luther College Band for 25 years, is a truly great choral conductor – a legend. Unlike all the rest of us, all conductors everywhere, Weston is saintly, quiet, completely spiritual and incapable of ever raising his voice above a modified whisper. I first met him when I was a member of the OklahomaAllState Band, in 1955. We high school students at that time thought you had to be a tyrant to be a good band director (mine threw steel batons at the students), so I’m afraid we did not appreciate Weston as much as we should have.
The next time I saw him I was with the US Air Force Band on tour in Iowa and I stopped to hear one of Weston’s choral rehearsals. I was astonished at how musical it was. One day while I was living in Salzburg I found him wandering the streets, he having a few days between engagements. My family was preparing to take a ski trip so I brought him home and gave him a guest room for the duration of his visit in Salzburg.
I heard one of the concerts of his retirement choral tour recently in Austin, Texas, and it was remarkable to see a large LutheranChurch filled with former students and alumni of LutherCollege. The current president of the college was on the first row leading the applause. To see the singers’ faces filled with love and devotion and to hear the exquisite soft sounds of purely spiritual music made one feel one was hearing something not of our world. And very recently I heard Weston as one of several choral conductors participating in a great choral festival in Austin. Present, of course, were the cheer-leader-style choral conductors raising the audience to a fever pitch. Then it was Weston’s turn, creating his trademark soft and spiritual sounds with hand gestures so small you assumed his face must be doing the actual conducting. All those who knew him, knew we would not hear this again.
James Neilson was another noble one. He was the band world’s Bruno Walter, always comparing what he heard with the great masterpieces of music. He was a quiet man, who projected sincere musical emotions when he conducted. He was very different from his colleagues and he was one person to whom I listened carefully when he spoke.
I want to mention two noble European conductors that I knew. Giovanni Ligasacchi, conductor of the civic band in Brescia, Italy, and founder of the civic music school there was another noble man. When I first met Ligasacchi he took me to his home and showed me a manuscript translation of my book about French Revolution band music into Italian. He had done this himself, as an exercise to improve his English, which he had first learned in a prisoner of war camp. It is a small symbol of this man’s constant desire to learn. He had found, and performed with his Brescia band, the one important French Revolution work I could not find in Paris, the Cantata on the death of General Hoche by Cherubini. He loved my own symphonies and was responsible for many performances of them in Rome and elsewhere. He was a special person.
Alfred Gross, conductor of the civic band in Wangen, Germany is another noble person. To escape a future under Communism, he walked from his native Bohemia to Germany taking only the clothes on his back, and eventually found a job teaching brass instruments. His instinct for self-education converted him from being an ordinary civic band director into a real scholar of German music. I once attended the 175th anniversary concert of the Wangen band, where I sat in the audience next to the mayor. The mayor told me that Gross had more influence in the town than he did! I have on occasion driven 100 miles out of my way to say “hello” to Alfred Gross.
Finally, for the purpose of making a point, I want to recall Jack Lee, Director of Bands at the University of Arizona. When I first entered the profession, Jack was very famous as a marching band director. He wrote a book maintaining that the marching band should be thought of as an art form, an idea no one paid any attention to. His real point, I think, was that the profession needed to rethink the football field as a stage, with a broader range of entertainment. The book personified his personality, grounded by age and training in an old definition of college bands yet always thinking of something higher. In his home he once showed me a vast manuscript he was composing, an oratorio for chorus and orchestra based on the “Seven Last Words of Jesus.” How many college band directors go home and compose oratorios? He also had in his home, by the way, one of the largest collections in America of 19th century lead soldiers. These little soldiers were made, and painted, to represent the numerous individual regiments of the Napoleonic Wars, and later wars. He had, among them, a number of sets of specific regimental bands, with players playing the serpent, the ophiclide, etc. He even had some sets which had belonged to Hitler.